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April 12, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:32
Edition 443 - Dave Beaty

TV and video producer Dave Beaty in Florida met Naval crew who saw the "Nimitz tic tac UFOs" - he's made a documentary and now talks about the incident and its aftermath...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope that you and your family, whoever's close to you, are getting by through this coronavirus situation that has gripped the entire world.
Life has changed in just the space of, well, what, a couple of months, a few weeks since the lockdown here.
And, you know, I hope that you're getting through it.
If you want to tell me your story, if you just want to shoot the breeze, whatever, you know, I'm locked down to here doing my work.
You can always get in touch with me.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
You can follow the link there and send me an email about anything, guest suggestion, whatever you want to do.
Always gratefully received.
Theunexplained.tv.
This particular edition is something different.
This is a conversation that I've just recorded here in the Home of the Unexplained for my radio show, but you need to hear this too.
We're going to speak with Dave Beatty, and he is a guy who is a producer and cinematographer in Florida.
He made what I think is a really good documentary that you can see in various places, as you will hear, about the Nimitz encounters, the Tic-Tac UFOs and the USS Nimitz, and also the Princeton and the Roosevelt in later years.
All of this, of course, came to light three years ago in a New York Times bombshell piece that rocked the entire world about these things.
An amazing UFO story and an amazing story of an apparent, I say apparent as so many of these things are, apparent cover-up.
Although we don't know much about the nature of that, you will hear some details here.
So the way I'm going to do this is just play it to you precisely as I've just recorded it here.
So this is how radio listeners will hear it and you're about to hear exactly what they heard.
And I hope that it's as fascinating to you as it has been to me.
So this is Dave Beattie and we're talking about the Mimits encounters.
Here it comes.
Thank you very much for another week of amazing emails that you've been sending me, both about the radio show which you're listening to now and also about the podcast.
Two new podcasts on 441 and 442.
Peter Davenport from the National UFO Reporting Center, excellent on 442.
Fezi Turkalp on Coronavirus and Technology 441.
They're both available on my website, theunexplained.tv right now.
Emails, just amazing.
Please keep those coming.
You can always communicate with me through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Too many emails.
The boss would get very unhappy if I mentioned all the emails right now because we'd spend an hour doing it.
But Keela or Kyla from Papua New Guinea, really good to hear from you.
The very first email that I've had on this show from Papua New Guinea.
I hope that you're okay and I hope that you can hear this now.
And if you can, then please let me know.
Now, we're going to talk this hour because we tend to go into things a little more deeply after midnight, as you know.
We're going to talk about ufology again, but a very different aspect of it.
Over the years, there have been a number of cases and situations that have been absolute mile markers in the history of ufology.
Betty and Barney Hill, the famous alien abduction case in the 1960s.
Travis Walton, another one.
The O'Hare Airport UFO sighting.
Was that 2006?
That was another one that made history.
And of course, Roswell in 1947.
Another one happened 16 years ago, but came to light only in the last few years because of a piece that was published in the New York Times.
This is the USS Nimitz UFO sightings, the so-called Tic-Tac UFOs, and the announcement or the disclosure of an organization called ATIP and a man called Luis Elizondo, who'd run for the U.S. government the ATIP program.
And all of this all came out Christmas, what was it, three years ago now.
It seems like only yesterday that I was talking with people like Nick Pope about this.
But a remarkable case from 2004 and information about it is absolutely still coming out.
Pilots giving interviews and others.
In the last year, there has been a documentary which has been updated more recently called Nimitz Encounters.
The man behind it is Dave Beatty.
Let me tell you about him.
He's in Florida.
We'll be crossing to him in just a moment.
Let me tell you about him, though.
Emmy Award-winning producer, cinematographer David C. Beattie is a UFO researcher, journalist and filmmaker.
His career in non-fiction TV and documentary spans 25 years or more.
Highlights include national programs on travel channel, history channel, PBS public broadcasting, that is, and more recently the short documentary The Nimitz Encounters, which has received, it says here, more than 4.8 million views.
I saw it today and it was well over the 5 million views.
A remarkable piece of work in my view.
But let's cross now to Southwestern Florida and to Dave Beattie.
Dave, thank you very much for taking time to listen to all of that.
How are you?
Hey, Howard.
It's really good to talk to you across the pond, so to speak.
I'm doing well and I hope that you and all your listeners are also being healthy and safe over there.
We're doing our best and I know that the United States is going through all kinds of situations with coronavirus at the moment.
I'm very familiar with the situation in New York.
Not so familiar with Florida.
How is it there?
It's not as bad, obviously, as New York State, which, you know, I think is just really a tragedy really to see the numbers going up there and so on.
We're hoping the CDC is saying that we're sort of leveling off.
And Florida, we're definitely not as bad.
I mean, we have some metropolitan areas such as the Miami, Brower, Gade County areas, which are suffering quite a bit more than we are over here on the western side of the state.
So we're paying attention to the news like everybody.
I think that's all you can do.
We just have to be guided by, you know, what is being done by those people who govern us and control things.
And we just have to take the advice and look to our personal safety.
Have you got the social distancing lockdown rules that we've got?
Yeah, yes.
Over here in our state, they have basically said that essential businesses can remain open.
That's like grocery stores and so on and petrol stations, pharmacies.
But everybody else that's non-essential, if we can, we're all trying to stay home and keep our distance from everybody else, basically, and doing the work at home deal like many people are.
Yeah, I guess that's how it is, and that allows us to have this conversation now because I'm recording this a couple of days before my listener will hear it, and I'm at home, the place where I'm doing everything now, and you're doing the same thing.
I gave your biography there, but it didn't quite tell the story about how this cinematographer, which you are, is so interested in UFOs and ufology.
Tell me that story.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it goes back a lifelong interest in ufology, especially the scientific side of it.
Investigating it in the 90s for the Mutual UFO Network.
I was a field investigator for a time, looked at some of the famous cases that you, you know, mentioned.
I've always been intrigued going back to the very beginning, learning the history of ufology and some of the main players that made their names in the scientific community, J. Ellen Hynyek, for instance, and the late Stephen Friedman, and following all that along.
I've always been very interested in it.
I haven't in my career really crossed that path.
It's always been sort of a pastime.
And this was probably the first time in my television career that the two things have sort of merged together, so to speak.
And did somebody suggest it to you?
Obviously, with your TV career, you'll have made contacts, so you'll know people.
Or was it something that you gave birth to?
Yeah, it was something that I gave birth to.
You mentioned the ATIP program and the New York Times article that was sort of the impetus for the whole story about the Tic Tacs coming out and so on.
And at that time, I sort of had been away from ufology for a while and I came back into it reading the stories and learning of this group called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences that had formed late in 2017.
And so when the New York Times article emerged, some of my friends that had an interest in ufology got together and we formed these social groups on, in the beginning it was using Facebook.
So we formed a discussion group and I opened that up to a whole bunch of people that were interested in the subject and they kind of flooded in.
And we began discussing these cases and immediately I started wanting to visualize what the descriptions of some of the witnesses were.
I wanted to see what that was like.
And I do have some skills as a computer graphics and 3D animator.
So I kind of quickly mocked up some what I thought were visuals that would represent this.
And people really enjoyed that.
Now, a lot of those were just still images and they encouraged me.
And I think that was sort of the, you know, the first stepping stones to creating a film.
It was like just in this private group and people really love seeing these graphics.
And that's how it started.
Right.
And you had the same impression that I had when this first appeared.
I was reading accounts, but I couldn't really see it in my mind's eye.
I couldn't visualize it.
The story wasn't being told in a way that I could totally relate to.
There was something missing.
And you got that feeling too.
Absolutely.
And as I began reading everything I could get my hands on about the case, because there were maybe three or four documents that came out, you know, in the first half of 2018, these, you know, of course, there was a New York Times story when To the Stars Academy formed a website.
They posted several descriptions of these encounters by the pilots.
And even going back as far as 2015, we discovered an article in Fighter Suite magazine by a former pilot named Paco Chirichi that he wrote a magnificent article about the case that no one had ever heard of up until that point.
And I used that as a step-by-step guide to sort of create the film and tell the story based on what the pilots reported.
I tried to really stick to the story.
Did you have a chance to talk to the people at To the Stars or people involved in that New York Times article?
I mean, I did reach out to almost everybody that I could.
In some cases, I was able to contact some of the pilot witnesses and so on at that time.
For instance, Commander Jim Slate of the Black Aces Squadron that was there and saw it.
I was able to get in touch with him.
I did talk to the pilot Paco Chirici that wrote the article.
And through those contacts, I was able to get some questions answered and so on.
And I reached out to the stars.
They were kind enough to, in the beginning, let me use a little snippet of one of the interviews that they conducted.
But because at the time I wasn't working for a major publication or a major broadcasting network, it was a little more challenging to get interviews and get people to listen to me.
So I was sort of like a grassroots filmmaker.
And, you know, that's kind of how it all started.
That's the first parts of it that I was using to the Star Academy's interview and then these 3D graphics that I created.
One of the other elements was the Department of Defense in the United States has a library archive that's available to the public called the Defense Visual Information Library.
And it features both still and video footage that's been created by Combat Cameraman across our armed services.
And all of that material is available in the public domain.
So that's the third part of this that let me make a film for virtually no money.
So hang on, let's get that clear.
We know that the Limits case is not the only one that's happened.
Are you saying that there is a public resource, a resource where people can go to and actually see these things?
They're not suppressed.
Well, the visual information library is pretty much public domain Footage of our military in action.
So, a lot of the footage you see in my film is carrier strike group operations, naval aviation, the squadrons operating off naval vessels, and so on.
And really, that's what it is.
It's not any kind of like suppressed UFO footage or anything like that.
This is like more standardized stuff.
But in telling the story of the actual encounter within Immits, it allowed me to use some, I would say, more stock footage of some of the ships involved and so on.
So that's what that is.
Right.
Well, you meld it all together really well.
When you started the process, and you'll tell me how long this took to put together, I know, were people encouraging towards you?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the people that I was sharing little snippets for were very excited.
I mean, I began working on this probably in January of 2018, you know, like the next month after the New York Times article that sort of revealed all of this case information.
And throughout that summer and into the fall, I decided to release the film on the actual anniversary of the event itself, which was, of course, you know, it happened on November 14th, 2004.
But then I released the first iteration of the film on November 14th, 2018.
So that's like that day.
And I really played it up.
So I think that in some ways by sort of creating a little bit of a buzz and putting it out there that this premiere was going to go down, I really got a lot of excitement going on because up until that point, there really hadn't been any other television documentaries and any other films.
That is surprising.
Sorry to jump in there, but that is the one surprising thing because you would have thought that the major networks and the major makers of these things would have been all over a story that made front page news in every country on the planet.
And they weren't.
Yeah, well, yeah.
I mean, they were, but I was just quick on my feet.
You know, I didn't have a bunch of producers and a whole network over.
You know, some of these series and stuff take like a half a year just to get up and up and running before they begin even filming.
So that was going down.
And I think that towards like in the later part of 2018, when I was doing my film, in some ways I stepped on a few toes and things like that because my film came was sitting out there and generating millions of views.
And then if we go like to the next year, 2019, that's when some of the first History Channel shows came out that were specifically focused on this, including To the Stars Academy's own production called Unidentified on History.
So that did come out, but it was like, you know, six months later.
Okay.
Well, I think you were just in the right place at the right time.
And like you say, you acted quickly.
This documentary, we have to say, is available for people to watch in the clear on YouTube.
I watched it before we started recording this.
It's a free, essentially a free production, isn't it?
That's right.
I mean, in the very beginning, my motivation, I've always told people, was to make a film that I wanted to watch because it wasn't there.
So I'm like, what an opportunity I have.
I can work on this on my spare time and I don't have anybody, anybody above me kind of controlling the production, which is unheard of most of the time.
But if you don't have, you know, dollars and budgets and sponsors tied to things, then you get quite a bit of creative freedom.
I mean, I had entire creative freedom to create anything I wanted.
So it was a wonderful opportunity for me to do that.
And, you know, I mean, I think that in many cases, you know, films get skewed in some ways by that.
And in this case, it was everything that I wanted, you know.
Now, we're going to talk about the individuals who helped you with this, the naval people and the others who were involved in this and who we see and hear in the documentary.
I want to do that in the next segment after we've taken some commercials.
Just give me a thumbnail sketch in the two minutes or so we have remaining in this part of how you got hold of those people.
You know, in the beginning, I was trying to get a hold of people and it was a challenge.
And after I put up the first recreation, which is much shorter, maybe half the length of the one that's up now, at the end of the film, I asked if you or anyone you know has had an experience or knows anything about this encounter, please contact me at the email not at the NimitzEncounters.com.
And that email is still valid, actually.
I'm still asking people to come forward.
And I had, you know, thousands of people actually come forward, but including several of the witnesses that were on those ships in 2004.
Right.
And were you able to check them out?
Because, you know, people can get in touch and say, they could get in touch with me and say, I was on that ship.
I saw all of this.
And of course, they may well have been there, but they might not have been.
Yeah, yeah, I did.
I did due diligence as a former journalist, and I did spend the time vetting my witnesses by not only, you know, the Navy has cruise books that show sailors pictures and they list the departments they operated out of.
And luckily, the USS Princeton and Nimitz have those books, and I was able to vet these sailors, and most of them also provided documentation to me, such as their military service separation papers.
And before I went too far, like, you know, putting them in a film indelibly, you know, I did check them out and check their stories out.
And all the guys that are in my film and on the channel definitely are vetted Navy veterans.
And they come across very sincerely, I have to say.
But, you know, if you're listening to this now, go and watch it after you've heard this interview by all means, and you'll see for yourself.
We're talking with Dave Beattie, a man who's a maker of television programs and is a man who's also heavily interested in the UFO topic.
Those things coalesced in the production that he made here, and I personally am totally sold on it.
I think it's a great bit of production, but judge for yourself when you go there.
We're going to introduce my listener, Dave, to the people that You got in touch with and who appear in your documentary.
First of all, they clearly were all very keen to have their story told because they wouldn't have gone on the documentary.
Why do you think that is?
You know, I think that in the beginning, when they first contacted me, you know, I think there were four different people that sort of emerged around the same time, almost to a man, they said that they wanted to support their fellow shipmates and brothers in arms.
They had seen the press across the world when you saw Commander Fraver, Commander David Fraver, the fighter pilot that went on almost every newscast around the world and every major newspaper around the world telling the story.
And they came forward and they said to me that they wanted to come out and support his story because they were there.
They saw this stuff actually in many instances from a different perspective.
But that's what they told me.
I don't think that they were ever really looking to be in my film when they contacted me.
That's not what their motivation was.
They wanted to tell me their story.
So that was how it first began, I think.
Okay, let's introduce them one by one then.
You can talk to me briefly about each one.
First of all, Petty Officer Jason Turner, who was from USS Princeton in 2004, that was the ship that was looking after the protection of the other vessels in what was, in November 2014, essentially a naval exercise off San Diego, we have to say, California.
He says, an actual event and I witnessed it.
Tell me about him.
Yeah, Jason was a sailor on the USS Princeton, and his role on the ship at that time was in ship stores.
So he wasn't like a, you know, manning the radar or anything like that or up in the bridge doing navigation.
He was, you know, somebody that was moving around supplies on the ship.
And he contacted me because he said that he had a classified clearance that allowed him to enter into spaces on the ship that were, you know, secure.
But because of his job, he had to bring, for instance, computer equipment and so on to these different areas of the ship.
And just by chance of luck, I think all together with his story, that he was in the right place at the right time to see some stuff on a computer system.
And that's what he came to tell me about.
We'll hear more about that in a bit because I'm going to play a couple of clips from the documentary, too, as we go through.
Then there's some, great name, Petty Officer Patrick Hughes.
He was on the Nimitz and he says that he is speaking for the shipmates who are having to remain silent.
Talk to me about him.
Yeah, so again, at the time, none of these gentlemen knew each other.
They're all good friends now, actually.
But at the time, they didn't even know, you know, I mean, Jason was on a separate ship from Patrick, for instance.
They didn't know each other.
A carrier might have 5,000 crew members aboard.
And Patrick was a member of the Wallbangers Hawkeye squadron.
And he was an aviation technician that serviced the Hawkeye, the E2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft.
It's not a jet, and it's got two propellers.
Looks like a standard kind of plane.
Yeah, we have to say that we have one, just for my listeners in the UK, we all know there is a plane called the Nimrod here that has a similar kind of big radar disc over the top of it.
That plane is like that, isn't it?
That's right.
And so his job was to maintain the aircraft and maintain all of the aviation or the electronic suites that these planes contain.
And of course, it's radar and all kinds of other sensor systems and so on that are on board.
And some of it's classified.
During each flight, they would have to install encrypted radio systems and remove data that would have to be secured and so on.
So that's what his job was.
Right.
And then two fascinating people.
They are Kevin Day and Gary Voorhees on the Princeton.
They were air intercept control.
What's that?
So, you know, Kevin Day was, you know, they call it an operational specialist.
And he was a senior chief.
So he was a pretty high enlisted rank.
He had been in the U.S. Navy for, you know, over 17 years at that point.
His entire career was pretty much on the Aegis cruisers.
And he was, you know, deployed at this point on the USS Princeton.
So in the Combat Information Center, which is the sort of brains of the cruiser where all of the radars are, his job was to oversee the tactical air space around the carrier strike group.
And Princeton's role is to protect the strike group from any airborne threats that could be aircraft or cruise missiles or anything coming in from the outside.
So these radars that are on this ship, they're very sophisticated in protecting the strike group.
And his job essentially was to oversee like a crew that was looking at the radars and so on.
Gary was a computer technician that worked on the Princeton.
And his role was to maintain all of this equipment.
So very sophisticated computer systems that run the Aegis ship itself and many other systems.
And his expertise was to maintain all of those consoles and computers and so on.
And so he spent a lot of the time in the same combat information center space as Kevin.
But Gary had a little bit of a unique situation in that he could move around.
He could be a fly on the wall.
And if there was something interesting, he found himself in different areas of combat, he calls it, listening in on conversations and looking at things.
So kind of an interesting perspective from him.
Absolutely.
You couldn't have, even if you dreamt them up yourself, you couldn't have found a better combination of people, I don't think.
There's a great spread of people.
Yeah, and they keep coming forward, Howard.
I have several more that I, you know, I don't, I don't, I haven't done a new film, but I have these guys that keep coming forward, you know.
And so I think a picture emerges as we move forward as to what are some of the, you know, possible things that could have happened, or what are the consistencies amongst all the men, and what things, where do they differ, and so on.
It's very interesting.
One of the things you see when we start hearing from these guys is that they are, this is on the voiceover script, I think, from the VO person, is that they are sailors for truth and vindication.
Very powerful statement.
That's how they all feel, and they still feel that the way that they still feel that today because I think for many years they carried this story with them.
And even with their loved ones, if they wanted to tell this story of the UFO, people would roll their eyes.
You know, I've been around the topic for a long time, so it doesn't phase me in the least.
But I think that a lot of people are very skeptical, obviously, of unknowns and so on.
And I think for them, they found that in their lives that they would tell the story.
A lot of times they'd get scoffs and jokes made or something, and they'd quickly change the subject.
And when all this story came out and so on, they kind of felt vindicated in a way that, okay, now it's in the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so on.
They felt vindicated.
And I think today it just continues on.
And I've asked them, I go, has this been a positive experience?
And I think that the two of them, man, they've all said it's been a very positive experience.
And I think you can see that on their faces.
Okay, let's get into the events then.
And I think some people may be surprised these things happened over more than one day.
It all began November the 10th, 2004.
This is an exercise, military exercise off San Diego.
Now, I've been to San Diego and I know that when you drive down the highway down towards the border with Mexico, then you have to pass an enormous naval operation.
So the Navy is huge in that area around San Diego.
This was a two-week training exercise.
Princeton and the Nimitz are the ones that we'll be talking about.
Princeton tracking appearing and disappearing radar tracks of these things that appeared.
So what I want to do first, if this is all right with you, Dave, is play a little grab of audio, a little grab of sound from the documentary.
And we mentioned Kevin Day with Gary Voorhees.
Kevin Day talks first very powerfully, and here's just a little bit of what Kevin has to say.
I was on watch, and we were probably 100 miles.
I forget how far exactly that day we were off the coast of San Diego southwest, kind of off the coast of Mexico-Baja.
And I started to notice these weird tracks that were popping under my radar coverage right around San Camani Island.
And the reason why I say they were weird, because they were appearing in groups of five to ten at a time, and they were pretty closely spaced to each other.
And they were 28,000 feet going 100 knots tracking south.
And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, you know, that's kind of odd.
I mean, I don't know anything that flies like that.
They weren't on the common air routes, commercial airline routes.
I wasn't really that concerned about them.
I didn't consider them hostile for any reason at all.
Another watch or two as I'm watching the same formation appeared again.
And over the course of three, four days, it probably counted up to that point, groups of five to ten at a time.
They're probably 50, 60 tracks by then.
Now, that, I think, Dave, you know, I mean, the audio soundtrack, by the way, as a sound person, is beautifully mixed.
But, you know, that gives a lot of us the first indication that this was not just something that happened in a couple of minutes on one day.
This was something that appeared almost coordinated.
It was over a number of days, wasn't it?
Yeah, that's correct.
And, you know, I must say that, you know, Kevin's testimony is very powerful and it's very unique in that when we listen to some of the other testimonies that have come out, in fact, all of the material that came out from the New York Times article and to the stars, at that time, they didn't know any of this because we didn't have any of the radar tracks or radar tapes or logs or anything like that from this event.
So when Kevin, who had this, you know, basically front row seat to the Aegis radar system for all these days, began talking about this, it was really interesting.
And, you know, I had numerous conversations with Kevin sort of off the record about what he experienced.
And he said that during that time, you know, his duty might have been a specific time, but he found himself down there in combat, they call it the CIC, at all hours of the day, days and nights.
And it was during that week, he said he was there all the time.
And there was many times when they would have these tracks.
They tried to recalibrate the system.
They tried to reboot the entire Aegis Spy One Bravo radar system and come back up with calibration.
And it didn't seem to matter.
In fact, they say that the tracks were better, better resolution after they did that.
Yeah, that was interesting.
You know, the first response was, there's got to be something wrong with the radar.
Then they recalibrate the radar and they find that these anomalous objects are still there, but looking sharper and clearer.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And at that point, you have to remember, they're like, well, we don't know what they are.
They had no visual.
They were thinking, is this a balloon or something?
Because at that altitude, at 28,000 feet, you're not going to have something going that slow.
120 knots, an airplane would fall out of the sky at that altitude.
Very, you know, the flight envelope wouldn't work with a plane.
So, you know, unless it's a jet doing, you know, 300 or 400 knots or something.
So they couldn't figure out what type of aircraft would fit the profile.
They were scratching in their heads at that time.
Didn't make sense.
And the guys on the radar loaded as many hard drives and tapes, I think, at that point, so that they were recording on multiple devices, tapes, hard drives, whatever they are.
And that'll be interesting at the end of this story when we hear what happened to those recordings and what happened.
But then the Black Aces squadron of planes prepare to launch.
One of them, Fast Eagle, flies to a point 40 miles away.
There is aerial radar plane, as we talked about, the Hawkeye, which is like the Nimrod in the UK tracking everything.
And on the orders of the captain, an intercept, well, it's after what is being observed.
The captain orders an intercept of something.
What was the something that they were seeing?
So, you know, as we just discussed, you know, Kevin had been tracking these objects up until the 14th.
And on that day, they just happened to have the F-A-18 Superhorn aircraft conducting an exercise.
So they would have these interceptors in the air that were doing an aerial defense training exercise.
They called an ADEX.
And this is going to be the first day during the carrier workups that you have the jets up in the air practicing, so to speak.
And over on Princeton, the captain decides to have Kevin, you know, send a couple of these jets out to investigate what these tracks were that they had at 28,000 feet all week.
And so Kevin basically, at that point, you know, finds the closest one that they can find on their radar, and they send that vector, you know, that bearing and so on to these planes.
And that's how it first started.
Right.
But then there is more to it.
And it becomes even more chilling and even more sensational because in the midst of the tic-tac or the tic-tacs, there is a disturbance on the ocean surface, something as big as a 737.
It's not a whale.
It's much bigger than that.
And then another tic-tac-shaped craft, 47 feet long, an object hovering above the waves and moving erratically.
And that suddenly, as UFOs are wont to do, as we say, ascends at lightning speed, I mean more than lightning speed into the air and then begins to mirror the movement of Fast Eagle, the plane that's already up there.
That is an astonishing thing.
So you've got this thing on the ocean, just underneath the surface, and you've got this tic-tac that is hovering above it.
Yeah, I mean, the first pilots that arrived, they were pretty high.
And again, the recreation that I did helped me visualize that because I couldn't understand what they would see.
And if they were at 20,000 feet when they arrived on the location where the radar track was, they looked down and saw this really small disturbance on the waves.
And that was really curious to them.
And as you can imagine, several of the pilots thought, well, whatever this aircraft was, it must have crashed into the water because now we see waves down there.
It looks like something is in the water.
And that was the first thought in their mind that this might be a search and rescue now.
So they descend.
One of the pilots descends closer.
And as you said, that is exactly when they spot this other object above the water.
And Commander Fraver was the one that was there.
He thought that this object looked like it was checking out the disturbance and down above that, moving around kind of in a very unusual kind of skidding motion side to side back and forth.
And then it began coming up.
It almost like noticed the fighter jet coming down towards it and it came up towards him.
And that's when they began dogfighting, so to speak, I guess, like turning on each other.
Okay, one of the things about doing this on radio is that we're coming up to more commercials, but I want to play your excellent, I think, recreation of some of the radio traffic.
This is verbatim, the radio traffic that was happening at that time when this thing races away in the blink of an eye and the object on the ocean disappears.
This is a little bit of the radio traffic from the documentary.
I saw it go 137.
No tally.
That didn't just happen.
Say again.
Basko Charlie, sir, you're not going to believe this, but the monkey group is now back at your cab station.
I mean, you can hear, even if you can't, you know, if you're not a military person, can't work out the lingo, the language there, you can make out the drama of the thing, can't you?
Yeah, I mean, it was important for me to do a recreation.
I thought that, you know, I can show these graphics of the objects, but I really wanted to almost play it up like what really happened.
So I'm using what I would call historical fiction.
There isn't a transcript of the radio, and there is no, as far as we know.
Oh, really?
So that isn't, I got the impression that was a verbatim transcript.
That is your impression, yeah?
That's correct.
It's based on the descriptions of exactly what happened.
I took that and then using historical fiction, obviously, since we don't have the conversation that happened, we recreated the radio transmission, so to speak.
Then a tic-tac, I just want to conclude this bit now.
Tic-tac appears and shoots away near the radar Hawkeye plane.
Objects descending from 30,000 feet at 24,000 miles an hour, defying gravity and physics.
In total, how many objects?
Because on the 14th, it really did get, as we say here in the UK, things really did get tasty.
On the 14th, how many objects were there?
According to all of the witnesses that I talked to, on the 14th, they intercepted one visually.
So they got a visual ID on the object.
And Kevin said that as they approached it before they had the visual on it, that's when the object dropped down from 28,000 feet to the surface of the ocean in 0.78 seconds, as he said later, which equates to over 24,000 miles an hour.
And we have to say that if there were anything resembling human beings on a craft doing that kind of speed, they would have been vaporized.
Yeah, I mean, I can't explain it.
I mean, I've asked that question.
I just don't understand what that even means.
I mean, could it be some type of mistake?
Were there two objects at different altitudes?
Again, I don't know, but they did see the one at the surface of the ocean.
And so after that intercept and the thing takes off, they can't find it.
So it's gone, basically.
Well, the next set of jets that go up, that's when they see the object again.
And that's where they actually are able to film it with the FLIR camera.
As far as I know, there's no other jet sort of encounters that day other than those two.
And then again, in the days after that, we don't have more.
So we have what Kevin described as hundreds of these objects Leading up into these intercepts.
Afterwards, there's really not the same number.
The pilots say that they only saw one.
Right.
Okay, we've got to park it there for just a couple of minutes.
We're talking with Dave Beatty, and this is the full story of the USS Nimitz encounter.
In fact, it's called Nimitz Encounters, his documentary: Events that Happened Almost 16 Years Ago That Rocked the World and Didn't Get to Be Heard About for Many Years Later.
The USS Nimitz Tic-Tac UFO or UFOs encounter and some detail that we haven't heard before now.
So, Dave, what happens after all of this?
Now, we know that when these events happened, certainly on the 14th of November, people who were seeing these things on radar, many members of the crew decided to rush out and watch what was going on in binoculars, didn't they?
They wanted to get a direct visio.
Yeah, both Kevin and Gary on the USS Princeton described to me how they saw these objects with their eyes from the ship.
And both of those guys said they went up to the bridge wing of the ship and looked at these objects through the big-eyed binoculars.
And they were able to kind of find where they were by, again, looking at the radar screen and trying to get a bearing of where the tracks were in a distance.
And if they were close enough, they were able to go up there and see these, what Kevin describes as boring white lights.
That's what they saw.
Gary goes into a little bit more description of kind of odd movements of the visual that they had.
And I've also talked to a couple other Nimitz sailors that are not in the film that also were able to see these white lights at night.
They said that they were sort of luminous and moving about.
And we're talking about two ships here, the Princeton and the Nimitz.
There were others.
But what was the vibe on those ships while these things were happening?
Yeah, so there was a lot of what they call scuttlebutt going on.
A lot of the sailors and deckhands and so on knew something was going on that was unusual.
But for the most part, there weren't too many people that had a need to know that would have had the clearances to be in those classified spaces.
And so there were rumors floating around.
I know that the pilots on the USS Nimitz got a lot of ribbing.
There was a lot of mockery and so on and jokes with the X-Files and creating cartoons and laughing it up basically at their expense because in some ways, you know, there's a stigma factor of ridicule associated with UFOs.
And the pilots that were out there chasing the UFOs got the end of that quite a bit there on the Nimitz.
But no laughing matter was what happened subsequent to this and happened very quickly and very chillingly.
I mentioned at the beginning of this, and this is where it becomes material, that there were multiple recordings on cassettes or cartridges, memory cartridges, and they are meant to be put on these ships into a safe and subsequently analyzed and reviewed, I guess.
But something else happened here.
Some people who hadn't been on either ship came along and effectively took them away.
Talk to me about that.
Yeah, so when I started speaking with these Navy veterans, I first learned of that, that there were material that was confiscated.
And up until that point, no other media, no other national media had ever mentioned anything like that.
None of the pilots ever mentioned getting debriefed or told not to talk about it or having anything taken from them.
In fact, they continue to this day to dispute that account.
But on the USS Princeton, we had Gary Voorhees, who is the man that was doing all the recording of the radar systems and a classified system called the CEC as well, as well as the radio communications are recorded onto an optical drive.
He said that soon after this intercept with the Black ACES squadron, people arrived on the ship that he didn't recognize.
He said that they were not wearing Navy uniforms and that his commanding officer called him down to combat information and they took all of the data recordings of the Aegis radar, the SPY-1 radar.
They wiped out the CEC system and they also took the radio communications and stood there and made him erase any blank media that remained just to make sure that he wasn't keeping something that they didn't confiscate.
So he witnessed that and he linked it to this event.
He said that he was very sure that this was related.
So over on the Nimitz, we have Patrick Hughes, the aviation technician with the Hawkeye.
So he at that point had no idea that anything happened.
Again, unless you had a classified need-to-know or part of this event, you wouldn't know what was going on.
And during that day, he didn't know that they were chasing around unknown craft, for instance.
But after the plane, the Hawkeye that landed that had taken part in this encounter, he went and took care of the plane and removed the classified, they call them RMCs, removable memory cartridge, or they call them bricks.
Several bricks on the plane, they're classified hard drives.
And they would put them in a bag and bring them back to their work area and put them into a double-sided safe where it had two combos and so on in their work area, very security safe.
He said soon after doing that, his commanding officer arrived with two, as he describes, U.S. Air Force officers, and they take his data recordings.
And he thought it was very unusual.
I asked him if this had ever happened in his Navy career.
And he said this was the one and only time that this ever happened.
He said it was highly unusual.
I said, well, after the fact, do you think that this was related to this UFO?
He goes, absolutely, because I'm almost certain that the stuff that they wanted was directly related to the UFO stuff.
So Quite interesting.
And since the documentary, I've had several other people that have sort of concurred with that.
A guy that worked with the helicopters, the detachments, has told me that he also witnessed these gentlemen kind of arriving and leaving, and he felt for sure that it was related to the UFO.
So these people wearing uniforms that weren't recognized by people on the ships, they arrived on Seahawk helicopters.
They very quickly got hold of the data, the recordings, all of them.
They insisted that any tapes that might be lying around that were nothing to do with this, blank tapes or whatever they might have been, were also erased, so that there was zero possibility of anybody having any other recordings of this.
Then these people disappeared on their Seahawk helicopters.
So clearly, while all this stuff was happening, somebody from somewhere was being summoned to those ships.
Somebody knew about this going down, and we know that there was calls to the Air Force, perhaps in advance of the intercepts, trying to ID the radar tracks.
There were calls to the base, you know, they were trying to figure out what they were seeing on the radar.
So people kind of knew that this was going down.
And you have to remember, like you said, with San Diego being, you know, in a helicopter ride, maybe 30, 40 minutes away, it wouldn't take anybody really to travel that far out to the carriers or to the ships.
And the Princeton also had a helipad on the back of the ship and its own two helicopters.
So whether they were there in advance or if they arrived, you know, that's still a mystery.
I have not been able ever to find any other lead or any other involvement with any agency or anything that ties to this.
In fact, as I said, you know, the pilots still sort of deny that this occurred.
Okay, well, I think there has been this year some further talk about all of this.
The principals involved were all sworn to secrecy.
They were made to sign non-disclosures.
How come then the four people who you've spoken to have presumably gone against those non-disclosures?
It was described to me that a lot of these guys that have clearances on the ships that have classified clearances to work in various departments and so on, they do sign non-disclosures based on a project they're working on.
So it wasn't unheard of to do that.
And the only people that, according to Patrick Hughes and his friend Roger, the only people that they were aware of that signed anything were from the Hawkeye, the E2 Hawkeye crew.
And I had a communication with one of the crew members that wants to remain anonymous that described to me that day and sort of the unusual circumstances of when they arrived back on the Nimitz and they were taken to a secured space on the ship and debriefed, so to speak, and told not to talk about it and given NDAs to sign.
No one else had to do that.
And no one else was told, you know, like, you're not going to, this didn't, this event did not happen.
You're not going to talk about it.
No one else.
So out of everybody, that's the only group that I have ever found that said they had to sign NDAs.
And I don't have a copy of the NDA.
I don't have, you know, the details of exactly what went down.
But I don't think that, you know, if that crew member hadn't ever mentioned it, I don't think we would know anything about it.
Wow.
Okay, let's hear a recording now, just a quick one, that I find very powerful.
This is Petty Officer Jason Turner.
He was on the Princeton talking about a video that he did see.
And the description is pretty amazing.
And I'll get you to talk about it once we've heard it.
This thing was going berserk, like making turns.
It's incredible.
The amount of g-forces that it would put on the human that this thing was doing.
The jets were trying to trail this thing, and it would just run off and leave them.
It would just be gone.
And then it would come back.
And then you would see it.
And then it would, I mean, it made a maneuver.
Like, they were chasing it straight on.
It was going with them.
This thing stopped, turned, and just gone.
And if anything summarizes what happened across those days, I think that testimony does.
What was he talking about?
So, yeah, so Jason was the supply guy on the Princeton.
And during that day, he had gone up to the ship's signal exploitation space.
It's basically an Intel space on the Princeton where there's cryptographic technicians that work in there and so on.
And he was delivering some stuff.
So he had a clearance to go there.
And he was allowed into that space.
And he said, while he was there, he kind of glanced over at one of the computers and they were playing this film.
And that's what you hear him describe.
He told me that he was there for, you know, 10 or 20 minutes watching this film and that he thought that it might have been, the film itself might have played seven to 10 minutes.
I'm not sure if it was looping, a video that was looping, or if it was real time.
I'm not sure he even knew at the time what the source was.
But somebody that was there told him that, you know, this is real life.
This is not training.
And this is what they were doing that day.
So, you know, the problem that came from his testimony is the only video that has ever emerged from the encounter is like less than two minutes in length.
And, you know, some of the people that were the first to come forward said that that's the only video that exists.
There was no other video.
There is no 10-minute video.
Right.
And that stretches credulity, doesn't it?
So there's hours of this material.
There must be.
We really want to know where that stuff is and what's on it.
Yeah.
I mean, I've done research about these fighter jets that recorded the FLIR material, and I've talked to fighter pilots.
In fact, one fighter pilot explained to me that it's standard operating procedures on the Super Hornet, Block 2 Super Hornet, to engage what they call the cockpit video recording system, or CVRS.
There's two 90-minute video Recorders that are in these jets, and it's a standard procedure for the weapon system officers to engage those recordings at takeoff or soon thereafter before anything happens.
When you don't want to start recording something in the heat of battle when you might miss it, right?
So, in other words, just like London taxi drivers do now, they're recording from the moment they start driving.
That's right.
And I mean, these guys are going out.
Lieutenant Chad Underwood was the guy that filmed the FLIR video of the Tic Tac that is out there and it's in my film at the end there.
He would have probably started that recording as soon as they took off.
Now, most of it might have not been that interesting, but I believe that he recorded the entire engagement.
And unfortunately, according to Chad, he never got close enough to the object to make a visual ID on it.
And I'm not sure what happened.
I think that the thing took off and they lost contact with it at the end.
I mean, in our video, you see that the object just kind of moves off to the outside of the screen.
I think that they couldn't find it after that.
What a bizarre set of circumstances.
Sadly, we're running out of time, but we just have to say briefly, and this will be the subject, I think, of another conversation, Dave, 11 years later, 2015, something similar was spotted from the USS Roosevelt.
Yes, and the USS Roosevelt was operating off the coast, the east coast of the Florida in the naval operations area, and they were doing similar training.
I mean, very, very similar training to what the USS Nimitz was doing.
They call it Comp 2X, and their fighter jets are up there flying around doing practice runs, and they capture a UFO on their FLIR as well.
And that was one of the videos that was released by ATIP called the Gimbal Video.
I think it's much clearer than the Nimitz FLIR video stuff.
Very interesting-looking objects on those tapes.
So as we wrap this up, Dave, and congratulations on the piece of work that I recommend that everybody sees.
You don't have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to assume that there may well have been other encounters like this.
So I'm guessing that you and other people investigating these things want to hear from those people or any further witnesses of what happened in 2004 or indeed 2015.
If people want to know about you and your work, where's your home online?
Yeah, so you can just bounce over to www.thenimitsencounters.com and you'll see links there to lots of the documents I used.
And you can watch the film or there's a link directly to it.
The film is available on Amazon Prime Video as well.
If you want to help support me as a filmmaker, that's one way of doing so.
And, you know, I'm also on Facebook.
And you can look at the Young Guns of UFology.
It's a group that we have there that's open for people to join.
But absolutely, I say if you want more information, it's all out there.
Right.
We'll talk again about all of this, Dave.
Congratulations and thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Your thoughts on Dave Beattie and the Nimitz encounters gratefully received.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet here, please stay safe.
Please stay healthy.
Please stay calm.
And as I said on the radio show, please, whatever you do, stay in touch.
I love to hear from you.
Take care.
Be safe.
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